The Three Essences

Balancing oneself is about understanding oneself.

Don’t seek work-life balance. Find balance in all things you.

Leadership Zen, or at least the internal manifestation of it, is all about balance. It starts at a systems level, ensuring that we’re mastering optimal health and performance by making choices that promote harmony within our bodies, minds, and other supporting constructs. But when people discuss balance in normal conversation, it tends to focus on maintaining equilibrium between our work life and our home life. This is what we conveniently call work-life balance. One need only Google the phrase to see that it has become an integral part of our lexicon and an important topic in leadership psychology.

It’s also one of the less useful. That’s because it implies that we lead only two lives – the one that works and the one that doesn’t work – and therefore as long as we’re somehow spending our time split roughly evenly between them, we’re ok. The truth is that is nowhere near the case. Every one of us plays more than just two roles in our lives – more than just a few actually. Even within the more formal roles we’re used to identifying with, we move between them like acts in a play, changing metaphorical costumes with each new scene. In our professional lives, we are leaders, managers, colleagues, mentors, customers and a whole lot of other things. Personally, we act as spouses, partners, friends, parents, sons/daughters, siblings, coaches, community members – and a whole lot of other things.

Leadership Zen collects all of these roles into three umbrellasor Essences under which we generally operate and must find ways to manage. They are:

The Professional Self

The Social Self

YourSelf

The Professional Self is usually the primary focus of the work-life balance equation, because it is often the most formal and identifiable part of our day. The vast majority of us need to work, and we tend to spend a lot of time on it – sometimes more than we should because it can impact the amount we have left to take care of the other two Essences. This doesn’t just apply to what we’d call traditional “work” either. There is great diversity in professions and it applies to all of them.

The Social Self is commonly referred to as your personal life, but that may be a little simplistic, at least for our model. That’s because we all have multiple needs when we walk out the things we have to do (work) and get to the things we want to do. Among those is the human need for companionship – to be a partner, to have friends, to be a parent or a member of an extended family. Part of the art of balance is ensuring that we are always working to nurture this side as well as other aspects of our personal life.

Finally there is what we refer to as YOURSelf, where we seek harmony between our mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. It is the most important of the Three Essences in that it is foundational – if you don’t take care of you, you can’t tend to your other roles very well. In our busy world, this is the Self that often gets most neglected. We spend so much time tending to others we forget that in order to live a healthy, fulfilled and sustainable life. Leadership Zen teaches us to recognize the need to start from within.

With Leadership Zen, you will learn strategies for creating a personal ecosystem that allows you to pursue the Three Idealsseamlessly within your everyday life. There will be up days and down days, but your ability to influence them will grow, and you will be prepared to cause change in others, and throughout the world.